Testing the Functional Profiles of School Refusal Behavior and Clarifying Their Relationship With School Anxiety.

Carolina Gonzálvez,María Vicent,Ricardo Sanmartín,Aitana Fernández-Sogorb,Ángela Díaz-Herrero,José M. García-Fernández

doi:10.3389/fpubh.2020.598915

Carolina Gonzálvez, María Vicent + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2020.598915

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Abstract

Students with school attendance problems are a diverse and heterogeneous group whose patterns of symptomatology can change over time. This study aims to identify different school refusal behavior profiles and to determine whether these profiles differ from each other based on four situational factors and three response systems of school anxiety across gender. The participants were 1,685 Spanish students (49% female) aged 15–18 years (M = 16.28; SD =0.97). The School Refusal Assessment Scale-Revised (SRAS-R) and the School Anxiety Inventory (SAI) were administered. Latent profile analysis revealed five school refusal behavior profiles: Non-School Refusal Behavior, Mixed School Refusal Behavior, School Refusal Behavior by Positive Reinforcement, Low School Refusal Behavior, and High School Refusal Behavior. The results indicated that High School Refusal Behavior and Mixed School Refusal Behavior groups were the most maladaptive profiles since it obtained the highest mean scores on school anxiety. In contrast, Non-School Refusal and School Refusal Behavior by Positive Reinforcement groups revealed the lowest scores in school anxiety. Non-significant gender-based differences were found, only girls were more represented in the mixed school refusal behavior profile in comparison with boys but with a small effect size. Findings are discussed in relation to the importance of promoting good mental health to prevent school attendance problems in adolescents and younger ages.

Highlights

School context plays a fundamental role in the cognitive and psychosocial development of young people
One of its main contributions is to analyze across gender, for the first time in adolescents, the relationship between school refusal behavior profiles identified from latent analysis and school anxiety understood as a multidimensional construct
The first three profiles coincided with those established in the first hypothesis. These groups showed similarity with those obtained in previous studies [31, 33, 34], in some of these works [33, 34], along with the previous profiles, another category was identified that referred to school refusal behavior due to negative reinforcement

Summary

Introduction

School context plays a fundamental role in the cognitive and psychosocial development of young people. School non-attendance has been linked to numerous deficits, such as cognitive-academic, social and behavioral. School Attendance Problems (SAPs) have been linked to poor academic performance, low scores on reading and mathematics tests, grade repetitions and even school dropout [1,2,3,4]. Likewise, internalizing and externalizing behavior problems are frequent in adolescents with difficulties attending school, among which we can include anxiety, depression, substance use and pre-criminal behavior [5,6,7,8,9,10]. SAPs represent an extremely complex phenomenon, which various authors have tried to conceptualize and classify [11,12,13].

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